2 ZHAW thesis template

In Chapter 1 you developped a Quarto based document in a bottom up approach. This was very important for you to get a good understanding of how Quarto works. However the output did not look at all like a document you could submit as a thesis.

In this chapter, we will introduce a Quarto extension we developped that will turn your quarto document into a PDF that meets the ZHAW LSFM requirements. This extension uses Typst as a backend to generate a pdf.

Note

All information on the thesis template / extension can be found here:

https://zhaw-lsfm.github.io/quarto-thesis/

What do we mean by backend?

Quarto does not have a custom PDF renderer. But Quarto is based on pandoc, which means that Quarto files are converted to a markup language that does have a PDF renderer. There are two choices:

Latex: The classical approach to rendering pdfs. Very old, very mature, but very complex.
Typst: A new markup language designed with an improved syntax and much faster compilation. It has a young, vibrant and growing community and we believe Typst will replace LaTeX in the long run.

graph LR
    Q1[Quarto] --> L[LaTeX Markup] --> P1[PDF]
    Q1 --> T[Typst Markup] --> P1[PDF]

Figure 2.1: Quarto files are either converted to typst or latex to create a pdf. We recommend using typst.

2.1 Tasks

Task 1: Change output format

Open the document from Chapter 1. Change the output format in the metadata to typst and preview your document (quarto preview index.qmd). If you already have a preview session running in the terminal, you will need to interrupt it with Ctrl+C and then run the preview command.

You can also give the latex renderer a try by compiling to format: pdf.

Before
After

---
title: "Robust Regression and Outlier Detection" 
subtitle: "Chapter 2: Simple Regression"
author: 
  - Peter J. Rousseeuw
  - Annick M. Leroy
date: "1987-10-19"
format: html
---

---
title: "Robust Regression and Outlier Detection" 
subtitle: "Chapter 2: Simple Regression"
author: 
  - Peter J. Rousseeuw
  - Annick M. Leroy
date: "1987-10-19"
format: typst
---

Task 2: Install the extension

To facilitate the writing of your thesis, we’ve created a ZHAW LSFM template that meets the requirements made by the department. We’ve packaged this template as a Quarto extension.

Quarto has a convenient way to distribute extension. Since we host our code on GitHub, you can simply install the extension using the GitHub Username/oganisation like so:

quarto use template zhaw-lsfm/quarto-thesis

# (we recommend you use a new, empty folder for this step and 
# answer the followup questions with `Yes`)

This will create the following folder structure on your computer:

1├── _extensions
│   └── ...
├── references.bib
2└── SOMENAME.qmd

1: The folder extensions is not important right now
2: A Quarto file with the same name as the parent folder is your starter file!

Task 3: Preview the document

Now, run quarto preview SOMENAME.qmd to get a first look at how your output looks like. Change the YAML metadata to meet your thesis and check the output.

Task 4: Read the template manual

We’ve written a manual on our template / extension. Have a look at it here

https://zhaw-lsfm.github.io/quarto-thesis/

Now, you are ready to write your thesis!